It is hard at first. But do you know what’s harder? Living a life you hate. That’s hard. This, by comparison, is a walk in the park.
One book I keep recommending to everyone is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography. What I love about Arnold is how human he is – caring, thoughtful, whimsical, and refreshingly honest about his mistakes.
“Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life” is his attempt to compile the same lessons into a more organized structure, built around the idea of being genuinely useful to other people instead of coasting through life.
Total Recall
I happened to read Arnold’s autobiography – Total Recall – long ago. I recommend it without hesitation, mostly for the hilarious anecdotes. “Be Useful” extracts the lessons; “Total Recall” gives you the stories that made the lessons stick.
A few things that stuck with me:
- Arnold was, first and foremost, a businessman and a salesman. He made a fortune in real estate well before his film career took off.
- On “Twins” with Danny DeVito, he negotiated a percentage of the gross instead of a flat fee. That one deal made him more money than his more famous movies.
- He married into the Kennedys, had an affair, lied about it, and that lie is what ultimately blew up the marriage. He’s candid about that too.
I think my favorite story is about his “European Bricklayers” business – from the Tim Ferriss show (click to expand)
Since Franco’s talent was to be a bricklayer, and a very skilled bricklayer, and he learned that in Italy and Germany, we were able to go and start thinking about putting together the idea of putting an ad in the LA Times, creating a company and calling it European bricklayers and masonry experts, marble experts, building chimneys and fireplaces the European style. This was also a time where everything that was European was huge in America, so we benefited from that. Swedish massages and everything had to be kind of a foreign name. Japanese this and this. Europe and Japan and all these places; the names were used because for some reason or another people thought that it was better. So we used that in the ad and we put the ad in the paper and literally a week later we had the big earthquake in Los Angeles. The chimneys fell off the apartment houses and all that stuff and there were cracked walls and all this. One of the friend’s of ours wife who was very smart and she worked in a supermarket, she did answering the phones and calling people back and all this just to make sure our English doesn’t get all screwed up with talking over the phone. She gave us the addresses and then we got to do the estimates and I was kind of like set up to be the math genius that figures out the square footage. Franco would play the bad guy and I played the good guy. We would go to someone’s house and then someone would say, “Well, look at my patio. It’s all cracked. Can you guys put a new patio in here?” I would say yes and then we would run out and get the tape measure, but it would be a tape measure with centimeters. No one in those days could at all figure out anything with centimeters. We would be measuring up and I would say 4 meters and 82 centimeters. They had no idea what we were talking about. This is so much and we were writing up dollars and amounts and square centimeters and square meters. Then I would go to the guy and say, “It’s $5,000,” and the guy would be in a state of shock. He’d say, “It’s $5,000? This is outrageous.” I’d say, “What did you expect? and he’d say, “I expected like $2,000 or $3,000.” I’d say, “Let me talk to my guy because he’s really the masonry expert, but I can beat him down for you a little bit. Let me soften the meat.” Then I would go to Franco and we would start arguing in German. [25:40 Content in German.] This would be going on and on and he was screaming back at me in Italian. Then all of a sudden he would calm down and I would go to the guy and say, “Okay, here it is. I could get him as low as $3,800. Can you go with that?” He says, “Thank you very much. I really think that you’re a great man and blah, blah, blah and all this stuff.” I’d say, “Give us half down right now and we’ll go right away and get the cement and the bricks and everything we need for here and we’ll start working on Monday.”
Arnold’s rules (from Total Recall)
- Turn your liabilities into assets
- When someone tells you no, hear yes
- Never follow the crowd – go where it’s empty
- No matter what you do in life, selling is part of it
- Never let pride get in your way
- Don’t overthink
- Forget plan B
- Use outrageous humor to settle the score
- The day has 24 hours
- Reps, reps, reps
- Don’t blame your parents
- Change takes big balls
- Take care of your body and your mind
- Stay hungry
The central lesson, repeated over and over: a clear, crystalline vision that will be fulfilled no matter what. Victory is then only a matter of time.
Back to Be Useful
I’ll be honest – I read “Be Useful” pretty briefly, because by the time I got to it I had already read “Total Recall” and most of the material was familiar. If you’re going to read only one, read the autobiography.
That said, “Be Useful” is organized around seven tools (have a clear vision, never think small, work your ass off, sell sell sell, shift gears, shut your mouth open your mind, break your mirrors), and the framing is useful on its own. The “break your mirrors” idea is the thesis of the whole book: stop looking at yourself, start looking at the people around you, and your life gets bigger.
The part I find hardest to actually implement is the vision piece. Arnold really hammers the idea of a single, focused, maniacal vision guiding your life. I agree it’s powerful. I also find it very hard to do – and that singular obsession seems to be the one thing every person who achieves greatness has in common.
A handful from my highlights
- Start doing things you like to do, or that make you proud of yourself for having completed them.
- Put the machines away and create space and time in your life, however small or short in the beginning, for inspiration to find its way in and for the discovery process to happen.
- It is hard at first. But do you know what’s harder? Living a life you hate. That’s hard. This, by comparison, is a walk in the park.
- There is no plan B. Plan B is to succeed at plan A.
- Don’t be a lazy fuck. Do the work. The only time you are allowed to use the phrase “I took care of it” is when it is done. Completely.
- Follow-through is usually the easiest part of the work in terms of energy and resources, yet it’s almost always the thing we either take for granted or let slip through the cracks. We say “I want to do this great, fantastic thing,” get the ball rolling, and just expect it to keep rolling.
- Rest is for babies and relaxation is for retired people. Which one are you?
- We aren’t giving young people the time and space to discover a purpose or to create a vision for themselves. Instead, right at the point where they have the least to lose and the most to gain from spending time out in the world, we’re plucking them out of it and sticking them in four-year universities – the exact opposite of the real world.
- “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” — The Terminator